First speakers for Technoport 2018 announced

We are excited to be joined by several amazing speakers from the research and innovation world

Here is a short overview of the announced speakers:

Scott Hartley, Venture Capitalist & Author

Scott Hartley is a venture capitalist and the author of THE FUZZY AND THE TECHIE, a Financial Times Business Book of the Month and finalist for the Financial Times and McKinsey & Company Bracken Bower Prize for an author under 35. A former investment partner on Sand Hill Road, he has worked at Google, Facebook, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and the White House, where he served as a Presidential Innovation Fellow under President Obama. He holds three degrees from Stanford University and Columbia University, and is a Term Member at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Yrr Mørch, Nanomedicine Specialist, SINTEF

Dr. Ýrr Mørch is a senior research scientist at SINTEF. Her main goal is to improve treatment of diseases such as cancer and serious infections using nanomedicine. Together with her colleagues and academic research partners, Mørch is working on the development and optimization of nanoparticles and on the understanding of how these tiny particles affect cells and tissue. This next generation of medicines is currently being tested through pre-clinical studies. Ýrr Mørch is a chemist by training and holds a PhD in biotechnology. She leads and is involved in numerous international and national research projects within nanomedicine.

Gisle Østereng, CEO, Seram Coatings

Gisle Østereng is a serial entrepreneur now heading Seram Coatings AS – a promising start-up commercializing a new coating powder based on the super hard material silicon carbide. Gisle has spent his entire career commercializing NTNU inventions and has a burning desire to get more jobs and economical impact out of the very promising research results at our universities and institutions.

Dr. Robert Langer, Institute Professor, MIT

Robert Langer is an Institute Professor at MIT (there are 13 Institute Professors at MIT; being an Institute Professor is the highest honor that can be awarded to a faculty member). His h-index of 233 is the highest of any engineer in history and he has over 1,130 issued and pending patents worldwide. His patents have licensed or sublicensed to over 300 companies. He served as Chairman of the FDA’s SCIENCE BOARD (it’s highest advisory board) from 1999-2002.

Langer is also one of very few individuals ever elected to the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Inventors. He is one of four living individuals to have received both the United States National Medal of Science and the United States National Medal of Technology and Innovation. In 2015, Dr. Langer received the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, the world’s largest engineering prize. He has also received the Charles Stark Draper Prize (sometimes referred to as the engineering Nobel Prize), the Albany Medical Center Prize, the Wolf Prize for Chemistry, the Millennium Technology Prize, the Priestley Medal (highest award of the American Chemical Society), the Gairdner Prize, the Kyoto Prize, the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences and the Lemelson-MIT Prize, for being “one of history’s most prolific inventors in medicine.” He holds 29 honorary doctorates including honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale, the Karolinska Institute, and Uppsala University.

Cilia Holmes Indahl, Sustainability Director, Aker BioMarine

Cilia Holmes Indahl is the Sustainability Director at Aker BioMarine, a global fishery and biotech company committed to improving human and planetary health, and one of the first companies in Norway to integrate the Sustainable Development Goals into their business model. Indahl holds a double master degree in International Business and Sustainable Development from the Norwegian School of Economics and HEC Paris. She is a board member at SoCentral, the Nordic Incubator for Social Innovation and Co-Founder of Sustainability Hub Norway. Prior to joining Aker BioMarine, she worked at the Unites Nations with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and as consultant for KPMGs Climate Change and Sustainability Services.

Armend Håti, Project Manager Innovation, Aker BioMarine

Armend Håti is a Project Manager within the Innovation and Product Development Team at Aker BioMarine. He holds an MSc in Applied Physics and Mathematics and a PhD in Biophysics from The Norwegian University of Science and Technology. During his PhD, he contributed significant advancements to the field of lab-on-chip technology and tissue engineering and his findings are currently being leveraged in the tailor-making of biomimetic materials and organ printing. Armend has spent time at world leading lab-on-chip laboratories at Harvard University and EPFL as part of his PhD education and worked as an Industrial Postdoc at EPFL prior to joining the Aker BioMarine Innovation and Product Development Team.